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9 March 1859, Wednesday; 7:30 p.m.
Concord, Massachusetts; Home of Ralph W. and Lidian (Jackson) Emerson
"Autumnal Tints"
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NARRATIVE OF EVENT: In his diary entry for 9
March 1859, Bronson Alcott wrote in part, "Evening at Emerson’s with my wife,
also Channing is there and some young people of the village. Thoreau reads us his paper on
‘Autumnal Tints,’ and admirable, the last work of our poet naturalist and seer
of the seasons"1
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: Alcott’s diary entry for 9 March continues:
I think he stands nearest nature and to the mastery of her subtler secrets than any
mind I have known; of a genius so penetrating, yet so holy, that in discriminating plant,
animal, cloud, rock, any colour, or whatsoever nature shows, he wounds never, nor rends;
as gentle as a maiden and as tender is his glance, his touch, his tread. Certain it is we
had never seen leaves before, the chemistry of evenings and mornings, of twilight,
of autumn’s comings and goings, her opulence of foliage, the ways she woos and wins
the moral sentiment and the mind through all her changes of leaf and landscapes. And then
his uses of the conventions of society in so witty ways to exalt and dignify Nature, his
Beloved, the pleasure in common things, and the surprizes along trodden and plain ways. A
leaf becomes a Cosmos, a Genesis, and Paradise preserved, in his wonderful treatment of
its spirit and parts united.
We sit till 10, and come home edified,
entertained by this wizard townsman of ours. It was fairie land, and the Elysium of Autumn
Season in Fancy and the thoughts while we listened.
"And
such is he, a forest seer,
. . . And at his bidding seemed to come."
Emerson’s Woodnotes.2
Although it is unclear if Franklin B.
Sanborn attended the lecture in Concord (he had heard Thoreau deliver "Autumnal
Tints" in Worcester on 22 February), he wrote to Theodore Parker on 13 March to
suggest that Parker invite Thoreau to deliver "Autumnal Tints" before his
congregation at Boston’s Music Hall, saying of the lecture that it was "as good
as anything Thoreau ever wrote" (Days, p. 414).
In a comment with implications for both of
the audience constituencies that Alcott had mentioned in his diary—the "young
people of the village" and its elder statesmen such as Emerson, Channing, and Alcott
himself—Thoreau wrote in his journal the day after his 9 March reading, "I feel
it to be a greater success as a lecturer to affect uncultivated natures than to affect the
most refined, for all cultivation is necessarily superficial, and its roots may not even
be directed toward the centre of the being" (J, 12:32).
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: See
lecture 59 above.
Notes
1. Alcott, "Diary
for 1859," entry of 9 March, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text]
2. Alcott, "Diary for
1859," entry of 9 March, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text] |